


Secrets of Hogwarts

by Shadow_Knot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Founders Era, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - Freeform, House Elves, Hufflepuff, Marauders, Marauders' Era, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parenthood, Portraits, Ravenclaw, Secret Passages, Temper Tantrums, Toddlers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 06:06:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15406665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadow_Knot/pseuds/Shadow_Knot
Summary: There are a lot of secrets at Hogwarts. There are the ones everyone knows about and the ones no one does. This is a story about hidden spaces, why they were built, how they were hidden away, and how they were found.





	1. The Kitchens

**Author's Note:**

> Hi,
> 
> This is the first fanfic I've ever written. I've been working on it for a while and finally decided to post it. Let me know what you think.
> 
> Happy reading!  
> Shadow_Knot

When Hogwarts was founded the kitchens were open to everyone. The entrance was fairly obvious (read: fairly obvious given it’s in a magic castle with moving stairs, doors that are only pretending walls, and shifting suits of armor) and students were welcome to cook or bake when they wanted to. The only elves were the three elves that belonged to the founders. The original elves (Rokrey, Loury, and Mibby) decided they would stick to maintaining the castle and let the students and teachers fix their own meals. The number of elves grew in the following centuries as Hogwarts absorbed more magic leading to the creation of more elves and welcomed freed elves in need of work. As the student and elf populations increased, they elves found that they finally had the numbers to cook but students were getting in the way. They just messed around while the elves were trying to do their job.

In 1387, the elves requested permission to block off the path to the kitchen. This had absolutely nothing to do with Geoffrey Scamander placing fire crabs and streetlers in the kitchen at the same time. No, it was entirely because the house elves thought they could better provide sustenance for the growing resident population of Hogwarts without student interference. The staircase leading from behind the teachers’ table in the Great Hall to the kitchens was blocked off leaving no way for humans to reach the kitchens independently. The elves could pop in and out of the kitchens at will, and none of the students or teachers could interfere. Twice a year the elves would take the headmaster in with them for the inspection, but the rest of the year the kitchen was their domain. Hogwarts, wasn’t quite satisfied with having the students entirely locked out, but Hogwarts was patient.

During the 16th century, the golden age of still life painting, Hogwarts accepted many donations of this new type of art. It wasn’t like traditional portraits, useful for history, communication, and spying. It wasn’t like suits of armor, useful for defense. But magic could work with anything. When a series of food-themed still lifes were placed in a basement corridor, Hogwarts went to work. The deputy headmaster who placed the paintings may not have remembered that they were adjacent to the isolated kitchen, but Hogwarts saw an opportunity.

May 21, 1538, two fourth year hufflepuff boys were returning to their common room after spending the evening revising in the library. They had missed dinner and were looking at the paintings of food and talking about how hungry they were. Suddenly, the pear in the fruit bowl painting started to giggle. The paint shifted and a bronze handle emerged. The two students, Archie Bones and Josiah Johnson, shared a look and shrugged; by this point, they were accustomed to the strange magical goings on of Hogwarts. Josiah turned the handle and opened the newly formed door. He saw roughly thirty strange small creatures with large, bat like ears and bulging eyes. With spindly arms and legs, they were as tall as Josiah’s hips. Beyond them, he could see pots and pans on low hanging hooks, wood burning ovens and a fire pit against the back wall, and plates, cups, trays and utensils in bins and on shelfs. All the creatures stared back; they had never seen a student in the kitchens. All of a sudden, they started talking, high pitched squeaky voices clamoring to be heard. They excitedly offered the two boys food while Archie quickly explained house elves to Josiah.

Ten minutes later, the two boys escaped the kitchens and finished their trek back to the common room. They hardly managed to knock on the barrel to let them in their arms were so full of food. Archie and Josiah placed it on the low table in the center of the common room. About one third of the study-dazed badgers got up to take food and began eating. One particularly determined second year, she would have to be up so late studying for second year exams, asked where they got the food. Archie and Josiah took Charlotte Smith, the second year, as well as two curious fifth years and one chronically hungry sixth year to the corridor with the painting. The handle was gone. Flustered, they explained what had happened with the giggling pear. Sixth year Amelia Wenlock reached to grab where the handle would be if it were just invisible. Her hand passed through the air brushing the painted pear. It giggled. Charlotte poked the pear, but nothing happened. Charlotte then imitated Amelia’s grab, which happened to stroke the pear. It giggled again.

With the realization that tickling produces the handle, the kitchen become an open secret of Hufflepuff house. The six students went back to the common room and shared how they got the handle to appear and met the usually withdrawn house elves. Since then, every badger that returned for second year was told how to tickle the pear to reach the kitchens, and it wasn’t uncommon to see food on the low table in the center of the common room during late nights, chilly mornings and rainy afternoons.


	2. The Riddle Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Hogwarts was founded, each founder built a space of their own. These spaces are emblematic of who the founder was and what he or she stood for. While Slytherin’s might be more well known, this is Ravenclaw’s room, the riddle room.

Each founder had to decide how they wanted to guard the entrance to their common room. Rowena Ravenclaw wanted her common room to be a space for those who were ready to think deeply and learn. She enchanted a bronze knocker to speak riddles and judge whether the student’s answers were worthy. Any who could answer well would be admitted for learning was not limited to those of her own house. This was a way to allow thinkers into the Ravenclaw common room. And good answers were not limited to correct ones. There was no single correct answer to any of the riddles. It was about the thought that went into the answer.

But how to supply the knocker with riddles? She tried runes first. This let her store 343 riddles in the knocker, which she did. When the knocker reached the last it would return to the first. This worked perfectly for the first three months of school. Then the problems started. With the number of times students were entering the common room, the riddles ran out much faster than expected. Students started to get riddles they had seen before. They would give the same answer, because who could forget the answer to a good riddle, and be denied. They were shocked. How could an answer be correct once but not twice? They’d be stuck for a while until someone exited, leaving the door open or another student came along who hadn’t heard the riddle before. But even that could be ruined if the first student shared their answer.

Three more months went by with Ravenclaw students being extra careful to have everything they needed for the day before leaving for breakfast. No one had told Rowena yet. She had been so proud of the knocker and the 343 riddles she came up with to fill it. The students remembered what happened the last time one of Rowena’s experiments didn’t go her way. No one was likely to forget the explosion that left a crater half a mile wide when someone mentioned a miscalculation in her arithmancy. And even if they did forget, the new lake wasn’t going away anytime soon. The Slytherin students thought it was pretty cool though. The muted light filtered through lakewater added another layer of mysterious glamour to their common room.

At the six month mark though, they couldn’t keep it a secret. The entire Ravenclaw house was standing in front of the knocker. What always runs but never walks, often murmurs, never talks, has a bed but never sleeps, has a mouth but never eats? Everyone knew the answer. They had already tried giving it, but the door wasn’t opening because no one had to think about it. So Ravenclaw house was camping outside of the common room. They tried the staircase first, but after one dreamy third year, Bartram Wildsmith, fell off the stairs they had to reevaluate. You don’t have to worry about Bartram though; fifteen Ravenclaws used it as an opportunity to test spells, with the goal of stopping his fall. He made it to the hospital wing with nothing more than a broken arm, rib, rope burn, a few very large bruises and without any of his hair. They never did figure out which miscast spell caused it or how to grow it back.

But now Ravenclaw house had to find somewhere else to camp out. Like the Ravenclaws they were, they went to the library. The library was quite small at the time, and all of the books were handwritten. Like most libraries, the Hogwarts library wanted to fill all its shelves with books, and because it was magical, the library could do something about it. Nothing too direct of course, but it could give a small reward to students who donated. All students had to be in their common rooms by curfew, but if you had donated a book, the library wouldn’t report you. Of course, Gytha Goshawk, who had already written a book, and Udolf Sayre, who had enough money to buy one, had already figured this out. They realized that for everyone to stay the night, every single Ravenclaw had to give the library a book. So an hour before curfew Ravenclaws started trying to donate as many books as possible.

The first years ran and took the books from the classrooms. The second years went to the other common rooms to ask if anyone had books they’d be willing to give to the library. Only the second years smart enough to ask to Hufflepuff were successful. The rest joined the third years in running around the rest of the castle and hoping. The fourth years took a few pieces of parchment each, folded them into codexes and wrote hastily. They made intro guides for their magic classes or wrote down stories from their lives as memoirs or recorded inane details common to everyone’s lives as histories. Most fifth years joined the fourth years in their frantic writing. A few however joined the sixth years in their attempts to transfigure other objects into books. Only one fifth year accidently transfigured her box into a brook instead of a book. If the sixth year prefect temporarily borrowed an empty bookshelf to use as a bridge, well, no one can be sure anymore. The seventh years conjured their own books and then edited those of the fourth and fifth years. By the time curfew rolled around Ravenclaw had a place to sleep and the library was very happy with its new acquisitions.

This couldn’t last forever though. After three nights, Darren Fortescue decided he didn’t care if it made Rowena upset, he just wanted to sleep in his bed. He also happened to love swimming and that new lake was just perfect for it. So the next morning when everyone was hiding the evidence of their prolonged sleepover, Darren volunteered to cast the concealment spell. His research had shown that a slight shift in wand movement would make the spell end early. By lunchtime, Ravenclaw house had been summoned to Rowena’s office. It was a tight fit, but with the help of experimental space-expansion charms they all squeezed in. The secret was out. Rowena knew Ravenclaw was sleeping in the library and from there it was quite easy for her to conclude that they were locked out because of the knocker. Of course 343 riddles wouldn’t be enough!

Well she couldn’t change the requirements for getting in. The other founders would never let her hear the end of it, besides she was pretty pleased with herself for thinking of it. So she found a solution. She took an unutilized room, there were plenty of those in the still mostly empty castle, and linked it to the knocker. In honor of Darren Fortescue’s cleverly underpowered concealment charm, to open the door one had to cast any spell with a slight alteration to power. If one cast luma instead of lumos, the door would open. If one cast rictusepa instead of rictusempra, the door would open. In the room, she built a second library. Except every book was a book of 343 riddles. Each riddle had a few suggested answers of course but the knocker could accept others if it saw fit. If magic could make paint semi-sentient why not bronze? All of Ravenclaw together managed to write four more books full of riddles.

It became a tradition, through the next few centuries every time the riddles ran out and the house was stuck the students and head of house would write more books of riddles to be placed in the riddle room. As the collection of riddles grew, these incidents became further and further apart until at last, no one remembered how to access the riddle room, but it wasn’t really an issue because the room held more than enough riddles to get through seven years before repeating. In the 15th century, the problem returned. Ekrizdis rose to power as a muggle-baiting Dark Lord. Even though previously, most muggleborns could not leave their families for a magical education at Hogwarts, many took refuge in the safety of the castle. But these new students lacked the background to answer many of the riddles based on the wizarding world. After all the last time riddles were added was the 13th century, and even if the wizarding world moves that slow, the muggle world had changed.

The new muggle-born students heard rumors of the riddle room, found the door, but could not find a way in. However, Ravenclaws are nothing if not creative. So they created a spell that allowed them to send an empty book, quill, and ink through the door. They convinced the knocker itself to learn new riddles. Since then, whenever a Ravenclaw is stumped by a riddle, they can give the knocker one in exchange. If it’s new and appropriate for first years and appropriately difficult for seventh years, the new riddle is added to the book and the common room door opens. 

Though the door to the riddle room was always there waiting, through the years people first forgot how to unlock it, then they forgot what was behind it at all. It became just another wall pretending to be a door. The riddle room amassed an enormous collection of riddles and the knocker had enough sentience to know that the older books should be, whenever possible, phased out for the newer. After all it had heard the subtle shifts in language across a millennium and knew that it would be difficult (read: impossible) for current students to understand the oldest riddles. 

February 14, 1976, four boys swayed on their way to the Gryffindor common room from their stash of firewhiskey at the base of Ravenclaw tower. They forgot they were in Ravenclaw tower, not Gryffindor’s so they reached not the portrait of the Fat Lady but a simple locked wooden door. Tonight these boys were adventurers! Peter Pettigrew no longer cared that he was too afraid to ask Mary Macdonald out. Remus Lupin was no longer jealous of all the girls Sirius Black disappeared with. Sirius was no longer tired from pretending to like all the girls he disappeared with. And James Potter absolutely did  _ not _ care that Lily Evans had rejected him for the 387 th time, Merlin damn it! They found this door and they were determined to open it. Now if only they could remember the right incantation for the unlocking charm. Aholomo? Omalohora? Amoholora! 

Amoholora was just close enough to alohomora to open the door, even though a regular alohomora would not have. The fifth years, stumbled inside, closed the door behind them and promptly passed out. When they woke up Sunday morning, they saw an open book on a table in the middle of the room with a really old quill next to it. It was full up to the open page and empty beyond it. Looking through the pages they saw it was filled with riddles, and there! Two pages from the break, Sirius had heard that riddle before. Bertram Aubrey had bragged that he gave it to the Ravenclaw knocker instead of answering its riddle. James had responded that that only showed he was too stupid to answer the riddle he’d been asked. Bertram, protecting his pride, had challenged James and began to duel right in the corridor. Of course Sirius backed him up and they sent Bertram to the hospital wing with a head “almost as big as the big head deserved”.

While Sirius and James recounted this story, Remus was put the pieces together and realized that this was the collection of riddles used by the Ravenclaw knocker. Peter was looking through the other books. He held one up exclaiming how he couldn’t read any of it. It just so happened to be the book with Rowena Ravenclaw’s original 343 riddles. The four hatched a plan for a spectacular prank. Wouldn’t it be funny if the knocker only used those riddles? None of the Ravenclaws would be able to figure them out! They’d have to sleep in the library...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering, the answer to the riddle is a river


	3. The Hidebehind Passage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when a magical toddler misses her parent? Hogwarts becomes the home of new giant slide!

Dilys Derwent moved into the headmaster’s office in August 1741. She had just retired from her job as a healer at St. Mungo’s and was hoping her new job would let her spend more time with her family. She invited her husband, Demes, and their two children to come with her while she set up. She had planned to clean out Amrose Swott’s left behind belongings. She had planned to spend some time putting in and arranging her own things. She had planned to then eat a simple dinner with her husband and children cooked by the house elves. She had not planned to lose her youngest child at Hogwarts and have to search the entire castle to find her. The first place she and her husband checked was the great hall. They remembered how Dot (Dorothy Lorraine really but it was much too long a name for so small a girl) had stared at the ceiling fascinated. Dilys was unprepared for what she saw.

One hour earlier, Demes, David, and Dot Derwent were climbing the stairs of the astronomy tower. A few flights from the top, three-year old Dot gave up and refused to climb another step. Knowing how toddlers got when angry, Demes acquiesced and continued on with David after extracting a promise that Dot wouldn’t leave the step she was sitting on. After five minutes of waiting Dot was bored. After another five she was impatient enough to go exploring on her own. She left the stairwell and started walking through the corridors. As she walked interest, turned to tiredness, turned to frustration and desperation. Dot was in a totally unfamiliar hallway. It had a suit of armor with a black plume and a painting of a man slipping in a puddle. She just wanted to find her parents again. She didn’t know where they were. She didn’t even know where she was! In the way of clumsy toddlers everywhere, she stamped her foot and slipped. She was about to faceplant into the wall when, with a burst of accidental magic, it wasn’t there anymore. She fell and kept falling, and because of the childish nature of a child’s magic, it was a slide. She slid down and down watching the wall recede ahead of her. Dot was having fun until she remembered she wanted her parents. In an abrupt moodswing, she became scared without their presence. With another rush of magic, the floor beneath Dot disappeared and, she fell right into her mother’s unprepared arms.

The hole in the roof of the Great Hall was covered. The painting of Elric was moved two feet down the hall to cover a hole in the wall. The new slide was left alone, and the corridor fell out of memory and out of use over time.

167 years later, the corridor remains unchanged. There is a painting of Bristo Fitzarthur Elric slipping in a puddle in faceplanting. It’s a magical portrait so he’s autonomous, not frozen mid-slip. But the puddle is definitively there. Elric had journeyed to the colonies in 1674 before being promptly killed by a hidebehind. Across the corridor is one of the many enchanted suits of armor. This one had a black plume on its helmet and a yellow crest on the breastplate. If you looked closely, you might be able to make out a stylized gold cup on the yellow background.The corridor was a path from the Gryffindor common room to the astronomy tower. It was so out of the way for everyone else that most non-exploring students had never seen the painting of Elric or the suspiciously colored suit of armor. So, when two first years wandered through this corridor in 1908, they were most definitely lost.

Newt Scamander and Leta Lestrange had met each other on the train two weeks ago, and they had stayed friends regardless of the clashing green and yellow on their robes. They had gotten hopelessly turned around. Then, from the around the corner, came the students’ voices. Not just any students, these Gryffindors had bullied Leta for her family name the week before. Desperate to avoid their attention, Leta pulled Newt behind the suit of armor.

They heard clattering noise but didn’t dare give away their position. They waited. The corridor was silent. Newt poked his head out. Where there had been a portrait, there now was a ramp. It led to a dark hole in the stone wall. Leta and Newt walked up the ramp and peered into the hole. They couldn’t see anything through the darkness. They assumed it was a secret passage. Leta had seen people emerging from doorless dead ends in the dungeons, and Newt had seen food carried into the Hufflepuff common room straight from the kitchens. Newt took one step through the portrait hole, squeaked and disappeared. He fell through the darkness, and he could feel the walls of the tunnel narrowing. The wall behind him seemed to smoothy rise and catch him turning the shaft into a slide. Newt slid down feeling moss and dust and slime and the webs of what had to be (in his mind) fascinating spiders. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been going or how far he’d gone when he saw a light. Prepared to spill into some other corridor, he was started to see it was simply a large hole in the floor with a wall on the other side. It was approaching fast. He wasn’t slowing down. He was going to fall, really fall this time. Newt’s hands frantically scrabbled in the tunnel, trying to find something to hold onto. His hands passed through one web, and another, and then more. They were getting thicker. Above the hole, he saw a net made of the webbing, and he reached.

Back in the corridor on the eighth floor, Leta didn’t know what to do. She was too slytherin to enter an unknown, potentially dangerous secret passage to Merlin knows where. She ran down eight flights of stairs to the Great Hall where she hoped she would find help. Inside she found a few professors at the head table and around 200 students eating lunch. However, there was a number of Ravenclaws acting more strangely than normal. They were all looking up. Leta followed their gazes to see a hole in the sky she was sure she hadn’t seen before. Then, from the hole in the sky (she had to remind herself again it was the roof), the Leta heard sounds of excited screaming, like a rollercoaster (although she wouldn’t know that) turn into sounds of terrified screaming, like a rollercoaster. Suddenly a pair of shoes emerged. They were attached to a pair of legs and the bottom of a Hogwarts school robe lined with yellow. The legs (shoes and all) jerked as if stopping abruptly.

Then he fell. Thankfully, the Ravenclaws knew some spells that could (potentially) slow his fall. Newt ended up in the hospital wing with some scrapes and bruises, a few broken bones, and a lot of missing hair. The cure for that type of accidental hair removal had been discovered two centuries ago though, so there were no lasting effects. Well, except for the discovery of a secret passage.


	4. The Training Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Godric Gryffindor gave up on training in public. He needed someplace private to hone his skills and where better than a not-so-hidden hallway in Hogwarts?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long, but it's here now. Enjoy!

Gryffindor’s sword wasn’t just for decoration. Silver encrusted with rubies engraved with Godric Gryffindor’s name just below the hilt, it could certainly function as decoration. But that’s not all it was. It was forged in dragon flame by King Ragnuk the first, the finest of goblin silversmiths who were in turn the finest of the world. The blade, honed to perfection and enchanted to never lose its sharpness, is attached to a hilt as strong as the will of the wizard who owned it (or rented it depending on who you ask).

This wizard was a dueler, and, as muggles mixed with magicals in those days, this meant he could wield a sword as well as a wand. In fact, he liked to boast that he was “the most accomplished duellist of his time”. This title required some work to uphold. He realized this two years after Hogwarts’ official opening. He could hardly ever find time to practice, and when he did he couldn’t find a space where students wouldn’t try to join him. 

Thinking back on it, the interruptions always ended badly, and not just for his dueling practice. Godric remembered the night when he’d gone to practice in the (not yet forbidden) forest. He had been joined by a student who hadn’t yet learned not to disturb the centaurs. The student summoned a lightning bolt but didn’t have the level of mastery required to leave the storm behind. It blocked the stars, ruining a potentially important night of divination for the centaurs. On the upside, Godric’s defence classroom received a generous donation of centaur arrows (purely decorational of course).

There was that time when he was practicing his swordplay against a conjured opponent by the relatively new lake on the grounds. A group of students formed and engaged in a few bouts of fencing. When one champion was revealed to be a girl, embarrassing and enraging the loser, Hufflepuff had to come and teach an impromptu lesson on misconceptions and prejudices. It went down with some students better than others. 

All this to say, he knew he needed someplace private to practice, someplace secret. Unfortunately, although discretion may be the better part of valor, Godric was not too skilled at being discrete. An announcement at dinner that the third floor corridor on the right-hand side is now off-limits to anyone who does not want to die a most painful death will only put off the new students who are too overwhelmed by all the craziness to question this one piece of it and the older students who are too busy to bother.

Godric worked on transforming that comparatively normal hallway into a magical obstacle course. In the first room, he set a trapdoor into the floor and placed a griffin over it. Godric’s family had a long history of taming griffins in the moors of scotland. Though originally from Greece, they had been imported centuries earlier to use as guards for treasure. He went back to find the griffin he had raised and named Ārās þ āserīca (meaning rising hero) after himself. With this protection. Godric could begin to build his training room. He created a steep fall into a series of rooms, each designed to hold one challenge. Magical flames would transport the trainee back to the top to rest up or try again.

Godric blocked the next room with a non-venomous species of tentacula, a challenge of dexterity to dodge the moving arms and projectile spikes. The third room was filled with ice, enchanted to resist melting. It was a test of strength, magical if the challenger tried to melt it with magical flames or physical if the challenger tried to hack it away. The next room was a strategy test. The conjured opponent would be transfigured to include defence against all previous attacks made by the challenger. The fifth room was empty. In fact, it was so empty of everything, including a floor. The challenger needed to make their own way across the 50 ft chasm. The sixth room was the simplest. It was Godric’s equivalent of a gym. It had weapons, weights, targets, and dummies. The seventh, and final, room was a test of courage. Once inside the challenger was trapped between two walls of flame. One blocked the doorway behind, and the other obscured the far wall. The flames looked the same but were very different. If the challenger attempted to back out by dashing through the doorway, they would get burned by the fire and then have to make their way back through the previous chambers. However, if the challenger boldly stepped into the blaze before them, they would be transport the challenger back to the beginning. It was more than a bit uncomfortable, as Godric hadn’t worked out all the kinks that Ignatia Wildsmith would before she commercialized floo powder, but it got them their without further damage. 

From then on, Gryffindor headmasters always used the hallway for something. In the 17th century Antonia Creaseworthy used the hallway to sew runes and weapons into her robes. She really did not like it when people touched her without permission. Walter Aragon used it to hide his not so secret collection of firecrabs. He had so many that he used their molted shells to replace the glass in the house hourglasses with real gems. Dexter Fortescue experimented with frozen treats as the house elves, during his tenure, still refused to grant anyone the privilege of using their kitchen. Albus Dumbledore… well, I think you know that one already…  

  
  
  



End file.
